Defining Personalization Features and Functions

When you access portal pages and team sites, the MOSS 2007 platform has the ability to present to users content that they care about and that is useful for their daily activities. With the introduction of Web Part Pages in SharePoint 2003 and additional features included in MOSS 2007, personalization and customization are provided via a rich feature set in a variety of ways. MOSS 2007 knows who you are and makes the user experience much richer. In the following section, you will see that by combining the User Profile, Audience, and My Site features together, you will create a powerful social network that will promote efficiency in your organization.

Information Overload With so many features and options available in MOSS 2007, information can become unstructured and overwhelming as more information is published and stored. The convenience of publishing to team sites, discussions, blogs, wikis, and document libraries and lists can contribute to increased difficulty for users to find useful information relevant to their roles and responsibilities within an organization. Published information can also be presented and structured in ways that cater to the masses but not necessarily to one’s specific needs.

Creating User Profiles

The User Profile features in MOSS 2007 allow you to connect with and search for people within your organization based on information people publish about themselves. In addition, information already stored in your Active Directory (as well as other LDAP-based identity management systems such as Organization or Manager) can be imported and surfaced within the portal. User profile information is also used by MOSS when a My Site is created. Users can then edit and personalize their My Site, which has two views: the owner’s view and the public facing view. User profiles are also integrated with search and indexing services to provide a better search and results experience. And last but not least, you can use many of these profile attributes to define audiences for content targeting throughout your portal environment. More information about these features appears later in this chapter.

You can edit your profile so that you can connect with people who have similar interests or expertise. Start by describing yourself and then identify people that you know. Administrators control which properties are editable and can add more properties if needed. Portal users can edit their profile from their personal view of their My Site. By default, your profile details are shown on the public view of your My Site. You can view and edit your profile in this view as well as the private view to which only you have access. Administrators are the only other users that have access to your Private Document Library.

The public view of the User Profile is visible to all other portal site users when they click your name in the portal site. For example, when you search for a document and see the author name in the search results, clicking on it opens that user’s profile.

If you access user profile information programmatically in MOSS and use it within line-of-business applications, your application can talk directly to the UserProfileManager object, which accesses and loads property values of specific users. You can use this information to render user-specific information or present relevant information in your own custom applications.

MOSS 2007 offers the following types of properties for developers who are building solutions using the User Profile store:

• Properties can have open or closed choice lists. Your list can be open, meaning that users can manually add new values, or it can be closed, which means that you cannot add new values, only administrators can. Now you can tie user profile properties to a constrained list of possible values.

• Properties now support multiple values appropriately called Multivalue Properties. This improved feature opens up many possibilities and scenarios for connecting users together and to content; for example, you might add multiple areas of expertise to your profile. Your job may require one skill, but adding additional skills to the Multi Value Property called Expertise allows users to identify your skills in other areas as valuable to accomplish team and/or organizational goals not related to your position.

• Properties can have an assigned Property privacy policy or policies. Now you can assign privacy policies restricting who can access a particular property. This feature enables you to set policies that define restricted access to Only Me, My Manager, My Workgroup, My Colleagues, or to Everyone. You can also decide if a property is disabled, optional, or required.

• Properties can also be mapped to other relevant external business data Property items originating from external data sources other than Active Directory. When you create a new property for a profile instance, you can map the property to an external data source, such as to an entity registered in the Business Data Catalog application. This allows you to tie people to data that already exists in other business applications or databases. In the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 release, the import of user profiles from the Active Directory services was the only configuration supported out of the box. Customers found it hard to manage the profile database and keep it up to date, especially those who did not have Active Directory deployed. Administrators taking advantage of the profile features were not able to centrally or easily manage the data.

MOSS 2007 addresses this issue by importing profile information from all of the following external data sources in addition to Active Directory:

• LDAP directory (other than AD)

• Custom Databases

• Enterprise applications (that is, PeopleSoft or SAP)

User Profiles are much more than just a grouping of properties about a person. They can be used for a variety of things within the context of MOSS 2007, such as implementing My Sites and targeting content. The public view of your profile is where these properties appear to users throughout your organization.

Included in all users’ public profile pages are the following sections of information:

• Profile Properties that are set to public appear on the public profile page. Shared Service Provider (SSP) administrators are the only people who can see and edit all user profile properties at the SSP level. Site collection administrators can see values of SSP-level properties in the user information list on the site collection, but cannot edit the actual user profiles and properties. They can edit site-level properties that are included in the user information list, but these are not added to user profiles stored in Profile Services.

• Relationship information that includes the sites, security group memberships for each person, registered distribution lists, and a section that lists your current associated colleagues. As you view someone else’s public profile, you can also see the colleagues they are associated with.

• A list of related shared Documents for each person that includes documents stored on all sites where the person is a member. These documents are organized in a convenient tab view.

• Policies are available to administrators. You can gain access to override certain policies as well. The Policies section manages how the profile information in other sections appears and which users have the ability to see it.

These features are presented to reinforce connections and encourage collaboration between people in your organization. When you access other users’ public profiles you can quickly see who they are, what they may be working on, and who they typically work with. It also enables you (as an administrator) to make decisions about how information is shared and who can see this information in your organization.

Targeting audiences

Audience targeting is a great way for you to get specific people or groups of people the data relevant to them. After you have defined an audience based on attributes in users’ profiles, SharePoint groups, or distribution lists, you can use them throughout the site collection. You could, for example, create an audience for everyone on the marketing team called “Marketing” and another for everyone on the sales team called “Sales,” and have Web Parts on a page targeted at each. You might have a Web Part that reports marketing news and another displaying sales trends. After configuring the Web Parts to show for their respective audience, users in each group would see only the content targeted to them. Another good use of this feature is if you’d like to show a list of links to secure areas of the site to only users who have access, You can get very granular in your targeting of content to audiences in MOSS 2007. You even have the ability to target a specific list item to a defined audience.

You define Audiences in the Shared Services Provider (SSP) administration in the Application Management page for the core services. The settings are accessible by the administrator on the server farm providing the Audiences Shared Service. There you can manage these three types of audiences:

• SharePoint group audiences, which are defined by SharePoint groups by associating each with a set of permission levels within a site collection. Members are then added to groups based on their user accounts. As an administrator you can create SharePoint groups and define their rights, which is a good way to manage access to content and features for large groups of people needing similar access. You can create SharePoint groups during initial server configuration and deployment or anytime after your site is created. In this way, you use Audiences that are based on SharePoint groups that target content to users that are members of the selected group(s). You author your Audiences based on SharePoint groups to be very general or as granular as a single user, depending on your particular business needs.

• Global audiences are audiences based on the properties of user profiles, which are managed by your SSP administrator. This type of audience targets content to users based on properties in their user profile, and can be as simple as targeting a Web Part displaying up-to-the-minute football scores to all users who have selected “Football” from the Favorite Sport option in their profile, to more complex options like displaying training links to people who report to a specific manager that work on the day shift and already have some expertise in engineering.

• Distribution lists and security groups are another option when creating and managing audiences. Distribution lists can be created by different users in an organization, depending on the policies of each organization, whereas security groups are generally managed by your directory administrator.

You must import properties of distribution lists and security groups to be used for audiences from mail servers and directory services, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows security, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and Active Directory. Each of these properties and distribution lists are imported when user profiles are imported to the system.

These user profile properties and their underlying sources can change frequently. MOSS 2007 provides the ability to schedule audience compilation to ensure that audiences remain current. The SSP administrators can configure the schedule to regularly update and can manually compile audiences from time to time if needed. The Compilation settings and scheduling features use the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Extensible Job Service.

Exploring My Site

My Sites are personal Windows SharePoint Services sites that provide personalized and customized information for you. The server administrator can enable personal sites from within the Shared Service Provider. After enabling this feature, users can access their personal profile and manage their personal information in SharePoint, and also store and share information with the rest of the organization. You can think of My Site as your personal team site or dashboard where you keep track of your colleagues, manage your exchange inbox, and save links to locations useful and important to you. Your My Site is created the first time you click the My Site link on the home page (or any other page) within your portal. Because your My Site is created based on a team site template, you have the same abilities you find on a typical team site as well as additional features, all of which can have a public view and a private view for storing secure information that you don’t want to share. The Profile page of your My Site shows your SharePoint memberships, colleagues, your Web log, and documents to which you have an association.

In your default installation of MOSS 2007, My Sites are enabled so that everyone in your organization with access to the site collection can have a unique My Site.

A My Site is a site composed of three kinds of pages, each from its own page template:

• The public profile page that anyone in the organization can see.

• A unique personal site for storage of private content and shared content, making it easy to collaborate with colleagues. The personal site has a private home page that only the site owner can access and view.

• Personalization sites, which are owned and managed by site collection administrators or people designated as site administrators, contain information targeted and personalized for the My Site user. The My Site navigation provides a navigation bar that connects personalization sites and other parts of the My Site.

People can navigate between their personal site home page, the public profile, and personalization sites by clicking the tabs in the My Site top link bar.

My Sites also include personalized views of links, documents, and other Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 features.

Each person can access their My Site by clicking the My Site link in the portal site. The first time you click the My Site link, your unique My Site is created automatically for first use. The My Links menu, next to the My Site link, includes links to all sites of which you are a member, as well as links to pages you have specified as you add to and manage your links.

Common features of personalization sites include:

• Inherited branding from the main portal that replaces the site banner logo with the My Site logo.

• Left and top navigation. The left navigation pane contains your picture (configured from your profile editor page) above the Quick Launch menu. The top link bar is specialized for My Sites users and delivers personalization links to users.

• Four Web Part zones: top, middle left, middle right, and bottom.

You, the owner or administrator of your My Site, are presented with the Site Actions menu with the following actions available:

• Clicking Create directs you to a page where you choose to add a document library, list, Web Part page, and other content needed for public profiles and My Site.

• Selecting Edit Page from the Site Actions menu opens your My Site in Edit Mode. This gives you the ability to add, edit, or remove the Web Parts (the content) presented on your pages.

• After clicking Site Settings you are taken to a central page to manage your My Site. Some examples of settings include managing Users and Permissions, Look and Feel, Galleries, and other administrative tasks.

From your own public profile pages, you can return to your personal site by clicking the My Home link in the My Site top link bar. Other users viewing your public profile will not see a My Site top link bar because they’re not viewing pages in their own My Sites. To navigate to their personal site, they can click the My Site link.

The My Site personal site is your My Site home page as shown in Figure 6.1. Your My Site personal site is private by default, so only you (or an administrator) can view the home page. This is the site that appears when you click the My Site link from within the portal. You can also access it by clicking My Home in the My Site top link bar when you are viewing your own public profile. Another way to get there is to click your own name anywhere you see it within the portal.

You do not need to plan any policy settings for the home page of your personal site because only you have access to the private site. You are the administrator of your personal site, which allows you to create and edit additional pages, change the default layout, customize the page to personal taste, and change your personal site settings. The default layout for personal sites includes:

• Quick Launch left navigation links

• View All Site Content page header

• My Profile links to management of the various sections of My Site and profile

• Shared documents and pictures visible to other users when accessing your public profile

• Lists, discussions, surveys, and sites added by you and visible to other users on your public profile page

• Web Parts in each of the four zones of the home page, containing private content viewed only by the user of the personal site

• Recycle Bin for the personal site, visible only by the user of the personal site

All of the Quick Launch links except the Recycle Bin are visible to other users on the public page of your My Site.

Other pages and subsites in your personal site, such as workspaces created, libraries, and lists, can be shared and viewed by other users. In that sense the personal site is not entirely private. Planning considerations for subsites and other shared content are really no different from those of any other site, except that management and decisions are up to each site owner for normal operations.

The public view of each user’s My Site is called the My Site Public Page. This page is accessed by clicking any link to a user within a portal site or site collection including links in lists (created by, modified by, and so on) and search results.

Using Personalization sites

Personalization targets information personalized to all members of your organization by using user filter Web Parts and personalized Web Parts. Site collection administrators are responsible for creating each personalization site; but another user with site creation permissions can also create them. Your SSP administrators can add links to personalization sites to the My Site top link bar, which can appear for every member of each site or be targeted to specific audiences. You can add links to personalization sites to the top navigation pane and the left pane of the All Site Content page of the main site. Because personalization sites are registered in the SSP, personalization sites from all site collections using the same shared service all appear in My Site—that is, as long as you belong to the audience the link was targeted to. Individual users can add links to other personalization sites that have not been registered by an administrator in the SSP, but those links only appear on that user’s My Site top link bar.

Personalization sites can be branded with either the main site logo or the My Site logo. The default layout for personalization sites is as follows:

• User Filter Web Parts in the top zone

• Your Picture above the Quick Launch

• Quick Launch left navigation, including links to the View All Site Content page and the Recycle Bin for the personalization site

• A Content Editor Web Part in the middle left zone that has some information explaining the purpose and prescribed use of the personalization site

• The Site Actions menu in the top link bar that contains an option to pin the personalization site to the My Site top link bar

Each personalization site uses filter Web Parts that connect Web Parts on the site to each individual person viewing the page, but there are no default Web Parts and each personalization site uses a different set of Web Parts.

Like any SharePoint site, each personalization site may include subsites such as workspaces and lists and libraries that are relevant to the personalization site.

Navigating personal sites is easy. You can use the top link bar on your My Site personalization sites to go to the personal site or the public profile of My Site. You can also go to any other linked personalization sites. You may also use the breadcrumb navigation to view other parts of the main site.

Your organization probably has its own unique personalization needs. When planning My Sites, you may want to consider several factors:

• The My Site feature is enabled by default in MOSS 2007, but you may want to disable it.

• You should think about where personal sites are stored and managed and how My Sites will work across multiple SSPs.

• You may have profile policy considerations that determine what information is shown on each person’s public profile.

• Think about specific personalization sites that are needed for your organization and who will create and own each site.